New, improved online sale

The online sale season has been largely glitch-free for both sellers and buyers this year thanks to months of hard-nosed planning

The online sale season is coming to an end. The top three contenders - Snapdeal, Amazon and Flipkart - are basking in record sales. The best part this sale season is there have been no reports of site crashes and stock-outs that marred the past two sale seasons. "This festive season I foresee a spring effect of targeted marketing and focus on quality customer segments. It is going to be a win-win situation for both shoppers and sellers and I can easily estimate this year's sales at a good $18-20 billion," says Anil Kumar, CEO of RedSeer Consulting. Adds Akhil Saxena, vice-president, customer fulfilment, Amazon India, "Last Diwali was four times bigger than the previous one in 2014. Like in the past, we are expecting this to be the biggest festive season for us in terms of traffic, new customers as well as gross sales."

How did the players pull it off without a glitch this year? Needless to say, learnings from the last two sale seasons and months of careful planning came in handy. "All pre-shipment checks and packing on fast moving items such as mobile phones, memory cards, power banks, personal care appliances, kitchen appliances, air conditioners, televisions, home theatre systems, printers etc. were done even before the sale started to ensure packs were dispatched within minutes of receiving an order," says Jayant Sood, chief customer experience officer at Snapdeal. "Nearly 20,000 tonnes of cargo will move by air this season. To ensure fast deliveries across the country, we have done bulk bookings with our logistics partners."

Well, that's just one part of the story. A larger task was to ensure surfers have a glitch-free experience while browsing a site and that they receive the products they order as fast as possible and without damage. That called for a major uplift of the technical infrastructure and deployment of state-of-the-art analytics tools.

Here, two things needed attention. First, the browsing experience. In 2015, many disgruntled customers took to social networks to complain that they were not able to either log on or "add to cart" products that offered great deals and that many brands went out of stock incredibly quickly. This time around, the marketplaces have made it easier to check availability of products, while also opening up dedicated sections on their websites and apps with deals lasting just a few minutes or hours.

Last year, Flipkart's Big Billion Days sale was accessible only via the company's smartphone app. Since then the company worked hard to reintroduce its mobile website and update its desktop experience to mimic the app. All updates were made keeping in mind the need to give consumers choice during the sale. "We've invested quite a bit in the last quarter or so to relaunch our desktop site and the capabilities of our desktop are now on par with our mobile app experience. With the benefit of hindsight, we did not provide flexibility to our consumers, but this time we have all these platforms - mobile website, app and desktop - and it is largely left to consumer what they use," said Ravi Garikipati, head of engineering at Flipkart.

For its part, Snapdeal went in for a massive rebranding ahead of the festive season sale. Alongside, the company redesigned its website for easier discoverability of products to improve the user experience.

All of them have set up war rooms - centralised control offices that have wall-length dashboards displaying details such as the type of goods being sold, places where customers are shopping from, the mode of payment and then slicing that data to throw up insights on how fast they can tweak their strategies to get more shoppers.

While monitoring sales in real time helped them make split-second decisions, they have also worked hard to beef up the backbone to be able to handle sudden spikes in traffic and shipments. Flipkart, the leader of India's e-commerce space, says preparations for scaling up its technology stack kicked off nearly a quarter ago, while initiatives to ease last-mile deliveries began nine months ago.

This brings us to the second part of the story - and that is hassle-free delivery. During last year's sale season, the big three had faced massive backlogs in deliveries. To fix that problem, this year they invested massively on scaling up their logistics infrastructure and are using temporary staff in the 10-12-day period after the sale, during which all deliveries will be made.

Flipkart has partnered with 1,200 kirana stores to ensure seamless last-mile logistics. Every day Flipkart will drop off between 30-50 packages at each of these kirana stores to be delivered to customers in the vicinity. The company expects 20-25 per cent of all deliveries coming from its Big Billion Days sale to be made via such arrangements.

Rival Snapdeal pre-packed fast-selling goods such as electronics and smartphones and stocked them at designated hubs across the country so that it is able to quickly process orders. It has also worked to beef up its capability to gauge demand, where it would come from and what products would get scooped up faster.

Amazon, which has the largest network of warehouses, is relying heavily on tapping storage space available with local stores through its "I have space" programme. The company has expanded its network of stores to 12,500 where it can stock goods temporarily to enable quicker deliveries during the festive season.

But there is also a new challenge. Till last year, online companies had a disproportionate advantage over offline stores in being able to offer huge discounts. But India's new foreign direct investment policy on e-commerce marketplaces has levelled the playing field for offline stores. This has forced online firms to focus on service quality and lock-in mechanisms such as Prime which Amazon rolled out ahead of its festive sales.